Negative Feelings as Emotional Enhancement in Cinema: The Case of Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise Trilogy

Abstract

A debate has emerged in posthumanist discourse about pharmaceutical mood enhancers such as Prozac to modify human nature. One side in the debate views such modification as the permanent enhancement of our human emotional makeup, aiming at the elimination of undesirable feelings by the unrestrained use of biotechnology that would take us further from our animal nature. This side of the debate is based on a technological concept of posthumanism, or ‘transhumanism’. It is a discourse which is dedicated to the enhancement of our human capacities, physical, cognitive and emotional, by means of advanced biotechnology and cybernetics. According to this school of thought, the transhuman is achieved by searching for escape from the physical entrapment of our material body by means of technological modifications of human biological constraints. In his ‘Cyborg 1.0’. Kevin Warwick writes, for instance, that his plan is ‘to become one with his computer’ and to evolve via chip implants into a superintelligent machine (Warwick 2000). In this mindset transhumanism is associated ‘with a kind of triumphant disembodiment’ as Cary Wolfe puts it (Wolfe 2010, xv).